Decibel Partners

You really can't bet against gravity - the funds have to flow! #gravity #funds #flow https://lnkd.in/eYjdrhAN

🚀 2025 in Computing: Seven Transformative Shifts **It's the most wonderful time of the year! VC prediction season! 😂** Here are seven key shifts that will redefine the industry in 2025: 1) 🌐 The Second Wave of AI Infrastructure: Moving beyond prompt engineering to scalable, secure, and reliable AI systems with private clouds and on-device processing. 2) 🖥️ OS for Agents - Standardized frameworks emerge for managing AI-driven microservices, enabling seamless coordination between specialized agents. 3) 🎮 Simulative Environments Enhance AI Reliability - Dynamic, game-like simulations become essential for testing and training AI, ensuring robust performance in real-world scenarios. 4) 🌍 World Models: Digital Twins Evolve - Advanced generative simulations transform digital twins into dynamic models for robotics, AR/VR, and autonomous systems. 5) 🔄 Less Clicks, More Flow: Evolving Software Experiences - AI-native startups redesign software around multi-agent orchestration and human-agent collaboration, streamlining workflows. 6) 🤖 AI Gets Hands-On: The Rise of Computer Control - Intelligent intermediaries bridge natural language intent with system execution, making sophisticated automation accessible to all. 7) 👁️ Beyond Chat: The Multi-Sensory AI Interface - Ambient computing and natural interaction patterns make AI a seamless part of our daily environments through smart devices and AR. 🔗 Dive into these predictions in my latest blog post! [Link in comments] ✨ Bonus Highlight: Given yesterday's news, I'd be remiss if I didn't highlight Databricks' historic $10 B Series J funding round, and what that means for the future of data & AI in 2025 & beyond! Expect to see much more coming out of there. Congrats to Ali Ghodsi & the whole Databricks team, and a special shoutout to Naveen Rao, Hanlin Tang, and Jonathan Frankle for their massive contribution to the future of unified data & AI through MosaicML.

Welcome to the Prowler team, Rajiv Taori, it's so great to be "official"! 🚀 With 10 million downloads, 10,000 GitHub Stars and 300 active contributors, Prowler is already trusted by cloud security teams at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Salesforce, Tesla, Okta and Redhat, and "opens the black box" of cloud security by combining the transparency of open source with the power of an enterprise-class, community-driven platform. Prowler is the open cloud security standard, so excited for you to join the movement! 🎉

👋 Hey Allie K. Miller, Thanks for the Aomni shoutout on your "Introduction to AI Agents" webinar this morning! “The thing that is brilliant about Aomni’s approach, and what sets it apart, is that it is going to combine with your content, your offerings. Aomni takes an agentic approach, reasoning through it and suggesting what to talk about as you reach out to your target sales accounts. I really like that! I like that it is not grabbing random research but giving you stuff that you can actually use in your business.” 🔥 Sales leaders, if you are looking for an unfair advantage in 2025 check out Aomni (free trial at www.aomni.com) 🚀

A few weeks ago, we hosted our inaugural Programmable Defense Summit in NYC where we gathered some of the most modern cybersecurity leaders to discuss the movement to a more transparent, adaptable and customer-centric security posture. In the latest edition of Founder Catalyst, I wanted to recap some of the learnings from the discussion: 🥷 AI-Enhanced Threats: Attackers are leveraging AI to scale operations, lowering the barrier to entry and increasing both the volume and variety of cyber threats. 📦 From Black Box to Programmable: The shift to programmable security gives teams control, enabling tailored defenses that adapt to unique environments. 🤖 Autonomous Defense: The path to a truly dynamic autonomous defense leads through programmability and first party data from real attacks & responses. 🎄 Happy holidays! 🎅 https://lnkd.in/gF7dgH7Z

Does it matter if you deliver results for your customers using AI or humans? 🤖 👨💼 In a recent BI article I saw that "EvenUp told BI it uses a combination of humans and AI, and this should be viewed as a feature, not a bug. The combined approach ensures maximum accuracy and the highest quality," EvenUp cofounder and CEO Rami Karabibar said in a statement. At Decibel Partners, we call this human + AI business model approach as "Managed Services-as-Software" or M-SaS. The goal of the company's engineering team would be to supercharge the human service desk and to enable them to service an increasing amount of customers over time, leveraging automation & AI tooling. Given that this can keep the customer experience consistent, I expect more startup companies in the future to adopt this type of model.

Disrupting the Helpdesk 🤔 ...yeah, that was probably my initial reaction, too! But when we dug in with Decibel faves Matt Peters Peter Silberman and Mase Issa we realized the message from IT teams everywhere is loud and clear: the traditional help desk is at its breaking point and it's time for something radically different. Enter Fixify, the game-changing platform that's reinventing the IT help desk experience by perfectly blending human empathy with cutting-edge AI technology! Highlighting this for my early adopter community, as we look ahead to 2025 this is one you are going to want to check out. 🔥 PS it plugs into your tech/ticketing platform 🙌 https://lnkd.in/dRVufn5p

Congrats to Josh Kamdjou, Ian Thiel and the entire team at Sublime Security for raising a $60M Series B (CNBC wrote about it today: https://lnkd.in/e92hpHHZ) and welcoming Colin Jones, former Wiz CRO, as President to run go-to-market! 🔥 “I don’t believe in black box as a philosophy,” Mark Hillick, CISO, Brex. “It reduces visibility, so I can’t see how Brex is going to be attacked. I can’t see what tactics or techniques are being used. With Sublime, I can do that.” And thanks to the founders and early adopter cybersecurity leaders (like Mark^) who are building and deploying open and transparent security products to engineer a modern community-driven defense. We call this the Programmable Defense, drop me a note or comment below to join the movement*! 🚀 Decibel Programmable Defense Summit (2024) attendees (partial list) Myke Lyons Fletcher Heisler Lenny Zeltser Marcial Quinones Peter Blanks Spencer Brady Shyam Bhojwani Sasan Padidar Sara Lazarus JJ A. Beth Cartier Damien Lewke Pete Markowsky Oliver Friedrichs Maxwell Krohn Jack Naglieri Arshan Dabirsiaghi Alexis Baldari Kyle Adam Bateman //O Scott Bachand Elena Kvochko Jadee Hanson Chase Wiley Christopher Witter Devon Rollins *not-to-be missed 2025 Decibel Programmable Defense events coming soon in DC, NYC, SF, RSA, BlackHat... 🎉

You've been asking... Never Too Early is back Jan 8, 2025 🎉 Our "First Time Founder" series will consist of deep dives with seasoned executives that have recently embarked on the founder journey. We will break down misconceptions around being a founder in silicon valley, early learnings, common mistakes, fundraising dynamics, hiring your founding team, and a whole lot more! Excited to see you all in the new year 😊

👏 Huge congratulations to Josh Kamdjou, Ian Thiel and the Sublime Security team on their $60M series B raise led by Cack Wilhelm at IVP! It has been incredible to watch Josh and Ian continue to build the most innovative product in email security, combining programmability, transparency and AI in one platform. Also pumped to partner with former Wiz CRO Colin Jones joining as President of Sublime for this next chapter of the company! ❤️🔥 🙏 Big thank you to our partners-in-crime Jahanvi Sardana Shardul Shah at Index Ventures, Dmitri Alperovitch, Andrew Peterson Kevin Patrick Mahaffey and so many other security founders for continuing to support the company in so many ways.